When you say plagiarizes, do you mean they are publishing their own docs without ads? Or you mean when the AI is reading the docs instead of a person they ignore the ads?

People don't just ask AI to produce a Tailwind app, they also ask AI specific questions that are answered in the docs. When the AI regurgitates the answers from the docs they don't visit the actual docs. Like the Google answer box in search results stealing clicks from the pages that produce the content.

This would also be true if someone wrote a book about Tailwind. Are they “stealing” clicks the too?

The answer is "it depends". If someone printed out the documentation and bound it together to sell without permission? Yes. The mere act of converting from one medium to another usually isn't transformative.

The test for writing a book is whether the author applied their own judgement in the creation of the book. Even if some explanations of concepts are inevitably similar the structure of the book, the example code, etc. will reflect the author's judgement and experience.

An LLM is incapable of authorial intent. It's not synthesizing the docs with a career of experience and the input of an editor. It's playing madlibs with the work of one or more prior authors.

I think its the latter.

It was a problem with their revenue stream, which was documentation website -> banner for lifetime payment.

All customers already had lifetime access and couldn't pay more. Plus noone was reading the docs on the webpage anymore.

Recurring subscriptions, ads in AI products (think Tailwind MCP server telling you about subscription features.) Those were just two things I pulled out of the hat in a minute.

I can understand recurring subscriptions and ads in MCP being a bright line that the team doesn't want to cross. You will probably say it's a bad business model to not make everything a recurring charge and packed full of ads.

I've experienced this in my own life - I ran my own business and I had to choose between doing a worse job and enshittifying the product to make more money, or doing a good job but risking bankruptcy. I choose bankruptcy, because I believed strongly in doing a good job and not enshittifying the product. I don't regret it.

And since AI knows every Tailwind page, you probably do not need the paid offer for a decent looking page.

Well you always could just read the docs instead of using the paid offer. Took longer. Not anymore.

It’s both.